4Children spearheads early years initiative

Mary O'Hara talks to Anne Longfield, the chief executive of the charity 4Children, about taking the lead on early years policy

Anne Longfield: 'Research is there to show that if you do intervene when children are young, then you are giving them the best chance possible.' Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian Graham Turner/Guardian

There's a bubbly, upbeat quality to Anne Longfield that belies a gritty determination. Describing herself as "an optimist looking for solutions", the chief executive of the charity 4Children says emphatically that she won't allow public sector cuts to take the wind out of her sails – especially when it comes to protecting "really very important things like Sure Start".

Leaving no doubt as to where her priorities lie, she adds: "Research is there to show that if you do intervene when children are young, then you are giving them the best chance possible. Sure Start is part of the gateway of helping people in the future. Some of the Sure Starts only opened last Christmas [yet] within three months were looking at closure."

As campaigns to save threatened children's centres step up across England, under Longfield's stewardship 4Children has landed a contract from the Department for Education to spearhead the newly launched Foundations for the Future, a government initiative that aims to shape early years and childcare policy over the next two years.

The charity is little-known and Longfield concedes it has minimal name recognition with the public, probably because 4Children is its third name in its 25-year history. It started life as that National Out of School Alliance before changing to Kids Clubs Network and then its current name. But it pipped larger rivals to the post to be lead strategic partner on the initiative.

Advising the government

4Children has a "very challenging" role to take a lead in helping the consortium of charities involved in Foundations for the Future, including the Daycare Trust and Contact a Family, to advise the government on the trajectory of its yet-to-be-pinned-down early years strategy. Many of the charities are extremely anxious about the impact of cuts and worried for their own futures.

According to Longfield, the charity partners will canvass the views of families and professionals working in the early years sector, and then relay suggestions for improvements to services back to ministers via 4Children. In theory at least, some of the recommendations from grassroots workers and families would be adopted to help reconfigure existing provision of childcare and early intervention.

Longfield accepts that the charity has taken on a thorny task at a critical time, not least because the coalition's austerity drive brings an end to a decade of extra resources for early intervention, including Sure Start.

"The thing about early years is that it has grown quickly but it's often been seen as soft policy option. What [the initiative] means is first of all we are going to be feeding in real experience from the sector and families into the government's policy as it is developing."

Longfield has spent the lion's share of her career in the lobbying and policy arenas (she spent a year seconded from 4Children to be a policy adviser in Tony Blair's strategy unit a decade ago). She continues to campaign assiduously to protect Sure Start and the 3,500 children's centres set up around the country during the New Labour years, and of which she was a pioneer. 4Children directly manages 40 children's centres.

But with some children's centres already experiencing cuts of up to 30% and restructuring, and many others facing possible closure, it won't be enough to campaign against cuts or to lobby to retain the status quo, Longfield insists. Rather, the onus is on the sector to make its case for early years projects to the government and, she argues, the pragmatism of direct input into Foundations for the Future is a potentially shrewd way to go about it.

She denies any suggestions that this approach could be interpreted as pandering to the cuts agenda. "The idea is to help the sector take on a stronger leadership role itself – identifying good practice and what works, sharing resources, and identifying barriers and solutions," she explains. "Obviously the rub has come now because there is a lot less money."

The pressing problem, she suggests, is that early years projects "barely had time to take root" before the financial crisis hit, and this has left them especially vulnerable to savage local authority cuts. "It was pretty obvious once the economic climate went down that Sure Start would have to fight its corner," she says. "It was a relatively new idea. It was seen very much as a Labour invention. And it was new. There was money behind Sure Start that possibly wouldn't be there in the future. They were late arrivals at the party and the problem with things that come late is that they are not in the baseline budget."

Longfield says we need to rethink the whole way we spend money on intervention in this country. "At the moment the vast majority of money goes to families at the point of crisis or after a crisis, whereas actually all the economic evidence shows that if you invest earlier it would actually save money," she points out.

Start at the bottom

What she says she will fight for is for families and communities to be "really listened to" by policymakers. "If you are going to grow those things [for example, children's centres], and they are really important things to have, it's going to take time and it's going to need to start at the bottom rather than be something that's a kind of intellectual concept. The world won't change unless people change and unless they feel that change."

She has concerns about the coalition. "I guess the thing that worries me most is that we haven't yet seen the conviction [from the coalition] to force things through – to see things through into reality that makes a difference for families on the ground."

The current difficulties facing those calling for early years services, "especially in the most disadvantaged areas", are a huge contrast to the New Labour years, Longfield says. She praises the previous government for launching Sure Start and, particularly in the latter years, for championing initiatives such as the Family Commission that Longfield chaired, which successfully called for the extension of children's centres.

If she has a particular criticism of the last government it comes down mainly to how money was spent. "There was more money to run lots of programmes but often what happened was they weren't running in conjunction with others. There were a lot of parallel programmes going on. We know that, despite very good intentions and large sums of money, problems weren't all resolved," she adds. So what would be an intelligent way forward for early years policy? "[Two years] is a relatively short period of time but there is an awful lot of experience in the sector that hasn't always been tapped," she says. She also suggests that the government might take on board what families say they need.

Curriculum vitae

Age 50.

Lives Ilkley, Bradford/London.

Status Married with 18-year-old son.

Education BA Hons history, politics and philosophy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Career 1994-present:chief executive, 4Children; 1991-94: director of development, Kids Clubs Network; 1987-90: national development officer, National Out of School Alliance; 1983‑87:community development in women's, children and youth organisations in the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Tower Hamlets; 1982‑83: researcher, Save the Children.

Public life 2000: awarded an OBE; 2009-2010: chair, Family Commission; 2000-2001: chair, National Childcare Commission.